British Council Creative Economy

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11 March 2015

Alchemy and Magick

Is wearable tech all about gimmicky gadgets? Lauren Bowker, The Alchemist at THE UNSEEN, will make you think again. She blogs about fusing art and chemistry and why London is the most exciting place in the world for creative wearables right now.

My company, T H E U N S E E N, is a London-based materials exploration house focused on integrating biological and chemical technologies into fashion.  We've exhibited at places including The Royal Academy of Engineering and The Barbican and I sit on the Board for the European Council for the Internet of Things.  

THEUNSEEN LTD

From the AIR collection, this hand crafted leather sculpture responds in colour change to the aerodynamic turbulence around the body.

The story behind The Unseen is very personal.  I became extremely ill during my first year at University studying textiles, spending my first year in hospital diagnosed with all sorts of chronic illness.  Upon gaining the strength to return to study, I decided I would no longer create stuff without purpose anymore, I was hell bent on changing the world!  I headed over to the chemistry department and my determination was one not to be messed with; I was going to study chemistry and create the world’s first pollution absorbent jacket whether it killed me in the process or not.

It was at this point I realized how easy it was to push the boundaries of the norms, if you backed yourself up with good reasoning, methodology and a worthy idea. I saw this gap emerging for a designer that understood science and could apply it creatively, so could work both in a technical manner in a creative realm.

THEUNSEEN X SWAROVSKI GEMS Image : Max Oppenheim

Over 4000 Spinel stones in the headpiece are fused with Unseen Magick to change colour highlighting the areas of the brain in use. Not two person has ever portrayed the same patternation or colour range.

I realized that I wasn’t necessarily interested in technology or creativity, I was interested in the stuff I didn’t understand or know about.  Through my need to make I was trying to learn and visualize what I didn’t understand.  So T H E U N S E E N was born.

Why The Alchemist?

The term “alchemist” was originally coined as a pet name while at the RCA,  there were two Laurens in our year and our tutor would refer to me as the Alchemy one in the corner, and so it stuck!

These days, alchemy is a reference not just to how I work aesthetically but how I go about finding my concepts, using nature and science to understand and uncover more about the world we live in.  Having a background in both chemistry and textiles naturally provides an aesthetically interesting practice, my studio is abound with bottles of solutions, pelts of hides and tools to apply and fuse various concoctions.

Image : Ryan Hopkinson

An Aura reading in Whites and Golds upon the flexible ceramic sculpture, our Eighthsense technology responds in colour change to digital data.

The UK wearable scene and our inspirations

I didn’t ever want to be labelled wearable technology, however we seem to have found ourselves in the epicentre of the London scene for wearables. In ways I’m thankful as it gives us a ground to showcase our work and a platform to build upon, but in many other ways I am sceptical. We don’t ever want to be perceived as a gimmick and I worry that next season no one will care about “wearables”.  For us, it is more about creating a vision that is strong and the products that come out of that vision are what sell.

We draw our inspiration more from places like The Natural History museum or lectures in Astrophysics at the Royal institute rather than other designers but along the way we have met some incredible UK based talent: Holition have been a huge big brother to us and people like Lucy McRae, Maiko Takeda and Roger Hiorns who have their own visions are real cool kids in our eyes!

How does the UK differ from other emerging creative and technical cultures?

I think the UK is a great place to be right now, there is so much energy in the creative fields and it finally feels like recession is lifting. As a creative you’re familiar with not making a tonne of cash, but the last few years have been particularly hard and I’ve seen and experienced a lot of struggles through friends and in my own work. Thankfully it feels as though that cloud is thinning and seems to have shaped us as stronger designers; our education system encourages designers to create good product that does more than the average.

The UK seems to have a great mix of both creative and also technically innovative craftsmen, we are bold in our visions but I believe sensitive to what we create. Our designers have that spark of pushing boundaries in every way.

I think the scene in London is about what the city has to offer us and the fusion of many things in one place. In one day you can smell the moon, visit a dead house, spend an hour drawing in a room painted solely by Turner, admire the technical skills of the Victorian walrus, run around the Science museum dressed as a cockroach, see the stars or hang out with a Vangoth if you felt like it! It's the heritage and imagination all around London that inspires our creativity.

THEUNSEEN LTD

Lauren (far right) and THE UNSEEN team.

What is the importance of creativity and craft within your work?

Creativity is the key to what we do here at TheUnseen in every aspect, from concept to research, design, process and production; we try to innovate at every stage. I believe that creativity unlocks the solutions when combining technology with matter for the human.

As a young company based in the UK we are focused on the UK market, creating an appetite here for what we do, but ultimately I see TheUnseen as a global brand with a British iconic face that is current to today, using new tools and delivering ideas to audiences through art, performance and product.

Globally, I believe there is too much emphasis on electronics and computational type wearables within the market.  I've been invited to speak at SXSW and I hope my talk will inspire people to look deeper at the term “wearables” and to see the unseen in it.

Lauren was one of our 2014 British Council/ h Club 100 creative entrepreneurs of the year.  She will talk at SXSW on the Next Stage on March 16 2015 at 12.30pm.